December 30, 1973

Books of the Times

You Still Can't Go Home Again

By SARA BLACKBURN

SULA By Toni Morrison 174 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.

In 1970, when Toni Morrison's first novel, "The Bluest Eye," appeared, she reaped the benefits of a growing, middle-class women's movement that was just beginning to acknowledge the reality of its black and poor sisters. As a result, her novel probably attracted more attention than it otherwise might have in the publishing industry and was received rather uncritically by readers and reviewers: socially conscious readers -- including myself -- were so pleased to see a new writer of Morrison's obvious talent that we tended to celebrate the book and ignore its flaws.

"The Bluest Eye" was set among unforgiving provincial black people in a small Ohio town and charted the experience of two little sisters as they watched a friend first become a pariah and then sink into madness. The book's general outline -- how witnessing and understanding tragedy forces the surrender of innocence and topples wide-eyed, precocious kids into unwilling maturity -- is a familiar one in American, especially Southern, fiction; but its language was unique, powerful, precise and absolutely convincing, both spare and rich at once.

Now comes "Sula," which features another pariah, spans the years 1921 to 1965, and seems to take place in the same setting: "In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Gold Course, there was once a neighborhood . . . . It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom . . . . They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs." While the setting and the characters continually convince and intrigue, the novel seems somehow frozen, stylized. A more precise yet somehow icy version of "The Bluest Eye," it refuses to invade our present in the way we want it to and stays, instead, confined to its time and place.

The heroine, Sula, grows up in a household pulsing with larger-than-life people and activity, presided over by her powerful and probably sorcerous grandmother. Her gentle mother is devoted almost wholly to the practice and pleasures of sensuality. But her cherished friend Nel, the local goody-goody, plays perfect counterpoint to Sula's intense, life-grabbing insistence that eventually gets read as recklessness, and Sula becomes a threat as her life unfolds against the rest of the black community's daily life of hardship, humilation and scrabbling for survival.

"What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitmacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal -- for them, none had ever done so. They did not believe death was accidental -- life might be, but death was deliberate . . . . The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn't stone sinners for the same reason they didn't commit suicide -- it was beneath them."

It's out of this that Sula emerges; she leaves the Bottom and returns 10 years later, after college and city life that we never see here, to be perceived as a sinister force, sex-hungry, man-stealing, death-dealing, a figure of darkness and betrayal. Having dared to smash the taboos that are her neighbors' poor guarantees of simply surviving, she's scorned, despised, abandoned by the people she grew out of -- to their immense loss.

It's possible, I guess, to talk about "Sula" as allegory -- about people so paralyzed by the horrors of the past and by the demands of just staying alive that they're unable to embrace the possibilities of freedom until the moment for it has passed. but Toni Morrison's novel is too vital and rich to be confined within such limits. Her extravagantly beautiful, doomed characters are locked in a world where hope for the future is a foreign commodity, yet they are enormously, achingly alive. And this book about them -- and about how their beauty is drained back and frozen -- is a howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter.

When the rage gets directed at its characters as intensely as it does against the conditions that formed them, the bitterness sometimes takes over. One scene, in which the child Nel witnesses her majestic, usually holier-than-low mother cringing before a brutal, repulsive white train conductor, is close to devastating: the mother is depicted with an unsparing irony, unforgiven.

Toni Morrison is someone who really knows how to clank a sentence, as the novelist Irving Rosenthal has put it, and her dialogue is so compressed and life-like that it sizzles. And Morrison's skill at characterization is such that, by the end, it's as if an enormous but too severely framed landscape has been unrolled and inhabited by people who seem almost mythologically strong and familiar; like the gorgeous characters of Garcia Marquez, they have a heroic quality, and it's hard to believe we haven't known them forever.

Yet the comparison can't be extended: Morrison hasn't endowed her people with life beyond their place and function in the novel, and we can't imagine their surviving outside the tiny community where they carry on their separate lives. It's this particular quality that makes "Sula" a novel whose long-range impact doesn't sustain the intensity of its first reading. Reading it, in spite of its richness and its thorough originality, one continually feels its narrowness, its refusal to brim over into the world outside its provincial setting.

As the author of frequent criticism and social commentary, Morrison has shown herself someone of considerable strength and skill in confronting current realities, and it's frustrating that the qualities which distinguish her novels are not combined with the stinging immediacy, the urgency, of her nonfiction. This last is a classically unfair carp on the part of a reviewer, but Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life. If she is to maintain the large and serious audience she deserves, she is going to have to address a riskier contemporary reality than this beautiful but nevertheless distanced novel. And if she does this, it seems to me that she might easily transcend the early and unintentionally limiting classification "black woman writer" and take her place among the most serious, important and talented American novelists now working.

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